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Member Requests

• Federico

Thanks to Workflow’s Content Graph engine, it’s easy to go from a webpage selection to a list of links and then to a PDF that is intelligently generated from the source webpage.

All you need to do is go to our Club Archive page in Safari, select the issues you’d like to save as PDF, and run the workflow. Workflow will see each issue link and convert the web version to a PDF you can read offline in other apps. By default, each PDF will be saved to Dropbox thanks to a repeat block, but you can save the files somewhere else if you prefer.

You can download the workflow here.

• Federico

The key trick here is to run a workflow inside the action extension from Safari and to use the ‘Get Details of Safari Webpage’ action to extract the information we want to compose the final message. Specifically, we need to extract the webpage’s title and URL as two separate variables, and then combine them in a single message to share on Twitter and Facebook.

With this workflow, you’ll be able to edit the final message before posting it because both Twitter and Facebook use the system compose sheets, which require you to confirm the message before sharing it. If you want to modify the post’s template, just edit the Text action.

You can download the workflow here.

• Federico

Assuming that you have a list of names where the last name is always separated by the first name with a comma, we can use the improved regex support in Workflow 1.5 to match both parts of a name, invert their position, and build a new list.

First, you have to decide whether you want to run this workflow as an action extension from Drafts or if you prefer to copy and paste the list of names into Workflow. For simplicity’s sake, I pasted a bunch of random names in a Text action at the top of the workflow, and I’d suggest doing the same for your list of names if possible so you can debug possible errors more quickly.

The workflow iterates through every line of text and scans for words separated by a comma. Anything before the comma is the last name, and everything after is the first name. Thanks to a repeat block, the workflow inverts them by constructing a new variable, which is saved to an empty list.

The workflow uses regex groups for first and last names to accomplish this, and at the end the result is copied to the clipboard. If you want to run this workflow as an extension, just make sure to pass the list of names as input text from Drafts.

You can download the workflow here.

• Federico

Alas, I haven’t come across a solution that has consistently worked for me either. I assume there has to be some way to do this through the Twitter API, which I don’t think can be accessed with Workflow alone. Maybe I should consider trying with the twitter module in Editorial soon…

• Federico

This still isn’t possible with Workflow, Marina. I replied a while back (Issue 21) to a question about converting PDFs to images, and it seems like those apps are still our best option on iOS.

• Federico

This was a fun one to tackle because it allowed me to experiment with the Workflow URL scheme and it pushed me to find a way to integrate two different action flows – create a Due reminder and send an iMessage – in a single workflow.

The workflow is structured so that when launched form the Workflow app itself, there’s no text passed as input. You’ll be asked to pick a contact from your address book, enter a reminder text, a due date, and you’ll be taken to Due to save the pre-filled reminder. Once saved, Due will ask you to return to Workflow; do it, and you will automatically exit the workflow.

A few assumptions I made:

• The workflow picks one contact from your address book and it returns their phone numbers; if phone number isn’t okay, change the ‘Get Details of Contacts’ action to email instead of phone number;
• There’s a list of pre-composed messages to choose from; you have to change this list to the messages you want to send;
• The date has to be formatted in natural language for best results, as supported by Due.

As you can see, the reminder that is created in Due contains a workflow:// URL to launch the same workflow you use to create the reminder. Which brings me to what I mentioned about input text at the beginning of the workflow.

Thanks to the Workflow URL scheme, we can invoke a specific workflow and pass some URL-encoded text to it with an input parameter. That text will be decoded on the fly by the workflow and saved to a variable. At that point, my workflow counts the items contained in the variable: if the count equals 0, it means the variable is empty and therefore no text is contained in it, which means you ran the workflow without launching it from Due. If it equals 1, though, it means there’s some input text in it, which we can use to take a different route and assemble the message you want to send.

When I realized I could use the URL scheme to pass different information to the same workflow, however, I ran into a problem: how would I embed information passed from a previous run of the workflow to the same workflow again?

My solution isn’t the most elegant one, but it works: the contact information and the pre-filled message text is embedded in the URL scheme itself, with a &&SEPARATOR&& line to separate the recipient’s phone number from the message text. The workflow splits the input text at the custom separator, returns a list, and uses the first item of the list (phone number or email address) to select the recipient, and the last item as the message text. At the end, an iMessage window comes up with the recipient and text already filled in.

To sum up, here’s what one complex workflow gives you:

1. Run the workflow and create a reminder in Due for a contact to text later;
2. Go on with your life;
3. Complete the reminder, which takes you to Workflow and prepares the message for you.

You can download the workflow here.

And now, a suggestion from Club member Denken about a cookie question (alas, less delicious than it sounds) from Issue 34 of MacStories Weekly:

[[suggestion]]

Not sure what and how exactly you’d like to do it, but there are at least 3 ways to get cookie information out of webpage programmatically:

• Write an app with webView, get cookie with NSHTTPCookieStorage.sharedHTTPCookieStorage();
• Write an app (Action extension, get cookie with JavaScript), and launch the action extension in iOS Safari;
• Add bookmark to iOS Safari, and change its address to JavaScript code that gets the cookie.

(Denken, @denkeni)

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